THE SNAKE PIT (Anatole Litvak, 1948)

Mary Jane Ward’s fictionalized account of her mental illness and treatment in a state asylum, The Snake Pit, became a film whose popular success—the book also was a bestseller—motivated Congress to legislate improvements in the U.S. mental health care system. Indeed, it is a famous film on many scores, winning Anatole Litvak his only Oscar nomination for direction and star Olivia de Havilland a unanimous victory in the year-end voting of the New York Film Critics Circle in the category of best actress—an accomplishment no other actor had achieved or would duplicate. Strong, engrossing, moving, this remains a good film, if not quite the great one it was once considered to be, and de Havilland’s performance, for which she was also honored at Venice (and by Italy’s film journalists and, at home, by the National Board of Review), is generally considered the most brilliant of her career—although her two Oscars were for other films: To Each His Own (Mitchell Leisen, 1946) and The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949). All three films were released during the short period when Hollywood was promoting de Havilland as “the dramatic queen of the screen.”

Virginia Cunningham is the name given to the character that is based on Mary Jane Ward. Whereas in reality Ward had begun her treatment in a private facility and was moved to a state one only after her spouse had exhausted their financial resources, in the film, for the sake of dramatic compression, Cunningham’s entire confinement and treatment occur in the state facility. Somewhat ridiculously, some commentators have complained that the psychoanalytical puzzle-solving that “cures” Cunningham is outdated and simplistic, but of course it is representative of Virginia’s treatment, not a literal account of it, again a form of dramatic streamlining, and as such it works, and continues to work, just fine. For the record, however, Ward’s lead doctor disapproved of his patient’s premature release and predicted recurrences of her psychosis. Ward in fact suffered two subsequent nervous breakdowns. For me, this does not put the film’s upbeat ending at variance with the truth, because the emotional charge of the closing scene, when Virginia Cunningham, “going home,” leaves by bus with her husband, Robert, conveys immense hopefulness, not any certain erasure of mental problems. Her treatment, we feel, has given Virginia some capacity to cope with her problems; it hasn’t dissolved them. Rather, the whole emphasis of the final scene is on Virginia’s joy at the prospect of returning home and resuming her marriage. It is her release from a kind of incarceration that sets the viewer’s heart to soaring, not any conviction of total cure—at least this is how the film’s ending strikes me. One of my complaints about the film—for me, a rare complaint about any film—is that this ending comes abruptly and too soon. The film might have taken fifteen or twenty minutes more to establish a more convincing basis for the patient’s release. On the other hand, the film stresses that the asylum board that permits Cunningham’s release is largely motivated by its desire to free a bed in the overcrowded facility.

Freudian psychology had entered the Hollywood (and, through it, the U.S.) mainstream. Litvak’s film followed such other films involving psychiatry or Freudian psychoanalysis as Lady in the Dark (Leisen, 1944), The Locket (John Brahm, 1946) and Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947). In all these films the patient, either neurotic or psychotic, is a woman, but in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) the patient is male and the doctor, who falls in love with him before he becomes her patient, is female, although she joins forces with her male mentor in pursuit of a solution to the patient’s psychosis. In Litvak’s film, Virginia falls in love with her doctor, or thinks she does, and a point along the way of her recovery is marked by her realization that she isn’t really in love with him. Throughout the time that she does believe she is in love with doctor, however, she is coldly opposed at every turn by the nurse who is secretly in love with the same doctor. When with regrettable razor-sharp insight Virginia confronts the nurse with her—the nurse’s—sexual feelings for the doctor, the nurse retaliates with even more unpleasantness and cruelty. At the very least, their contest jeopardizes Virginia’s efforts at recovery.

The title of both book and film refers to an ancient method for curing insanity: consigning the insane to a pit of snakes. In the film, Virginia imagines herself in a snake pit; she is in one, the “snakes” on one level being her sister patients, and yet at the same time she is above the pit, looking down into it and seeing herself and the others. She also literally sees snakes. This simultaneous double perspective—inside/outside; Virginia’s experiencing what she experiences in the asylum, and observing this and (as voiceover) commenting on it—is part of the film’s narrative method for conveying Virginia’s welter of feelings, including her acute selfconsciousness, and the difficulty with which Virginia tries to make sense of her situation.

Sound is very important in this film.* The first sound we hear is that of a bird chirping. It belongs, we soon discover, to a bird perched on a tree branch on the asylum grounds. Virginia is looking up at it, smiling, while sitting on a bench. All of a sudden Virginia is confronted with an interiorized bodiless voice, that of her doctor, “Dr. Kik” (Leo Genn, excellent), the nickname of Ward’s actual doctor, Dr. Chrzanowski. (Gerald is the first name of Ward’s doctor; Mark, of the one here—an interesting change since Mark is the first name of Mark Stevens, the actor who plays Virginia’s husband.) Virginia cannot attach the male voice to any form within the range of her sight; but then she sees, also sitting on a bench, a sister patient, Grace (Celeste Holm, giving a rare good performance—her best, in fact). We learn from what Virginia thinks to herself, which we hear as voiceover, that she suspects that Grace is a disguised form of whatever man she had heard speaking, whose identity she cannot place. Nor does Virginia know precisely where she is. Once inside, she guesses that she is in prison for some crime she committed that she cannot recall, or perhaps, because she was indeed a writer, she is there on assignment. The contrast between decorous Grace, who anxiously keeps trying to rein in Virginia, and outspoken Virginia corroborates what Grace has already suggested: that she is about to leave the asylum as cured, while Virginia remains entrenched in her psychosis. Virginia is insane; Grace must have been this once. Now Grace is poised to go home; one day, the film’s opening movement suggests, Virginia also may be well enough to go home. In the context of all this, the bird’s natural freedom—with a companion, the bird had left the branch for the sky—assumes a delicate, retroactive note of poignancy. Something else occurs once Virginia is indoors: she is addressed by Dr. Kik, giving actual form to the voice that Virginia had imagined hearing outside. “Do you know who I am, Mrs. Cunningham?” he asks. Of course she does: “You’re the warden.” Neither does Virginia recognize her husband, alternating between maintaining her maiden identity, Virginia Stuart, and insisting that she is married though without benefit of a husband. This inconsistency, along with others, is compounded by Virginia’s alternating forthrightness and confusion, and by something else: the discrepancy in sound, and the emotional realities attached to that discrepancy, between the Virginia we objectively observe and the subjective Virginia whose interior thoughts we hear as voiceover. The method of this film, the way it portrays Virginia Cunningham on different levels, is clear and complex.

A sound that recurs in The Snake Pit is that of the electro-shock machine that is used to “make contact” with patients. It is a horrifying sound, a horrifying machine. Robert Cunningham hesitates a bit in signing the consent form for its use on his wife. “Is there no other way?” he asks Dr. Kik. “Yes, if we had time,” Kik replies. “We’re short of many things in a state hospital, but time most of all.”

Looking up at a bird in a tree: looking up is a motif in this film. Later, we watch Virginia look up from the bottom of the snake pit that she imagines herself inhabiting. The distance in this case, between Virginia and the top of the pit that she is looking at, is far greater than the distance between her and the bird. Striking her as an insurmountable climb, it pertains to her sense of the impossibility of her recovery and freedom. Indeed, the entire hospital is structured as a progressive series of floors correlative to the degree of recovery that patients are adjudged to have attained. Owing something, perhaps, to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the higher one’s floor, the closer one is to exiting the asylum and rejoining the world. But, as will happen in Virginia’s case, some patients do not go up and out; sometimes patients slip down, even by more than one floor at a time. This possibility also relates to the daunting climb one finds before oneself when one is at the bottom of the snake pit.

Going home. I can take Litvak (This Above All, 1942; Sorry, Wrong Number, 1948) or leave Litvak (All This, and Heaven Too, 1940; Decision Before Dawn, 1951); but The Snake Pit contains the single greatest shot to grace his œuvre. With Virginia, on the road to recovery, in attendance, the hospital holds a dance. On a platform at one end of the huge hall one of the patients stands and sings “Goin’ Home,” the pseudo-American folk spiritual adapted from the largo of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9—the New World Symphony. The song, of course, expresses the hopes of every patient there, but, for us, especially Virginia. The camera swoops over the heads of all the people facing the stage, ending in closeup on the one who is singing (Lassie’s television “mother,” Jan Clayton—recently, the original Julie Jordan of Broadway’s Carousel). Thus in one sweeping, heart-piercing camera movement, Litvak relates everyone listening to this sister patient’s singing to her, her song, its feeling.

Just as Grace once befriended Virginia, Virgina befriends Hester (Betsy Blair, with Michelangelo Antonioni in her future), a patient who doesn’t speak until Virginia is right about to leave and go home. Sisterhood; a relay of recovery. The final movement of this film, although hastily attached to the rest, is close to irresistible.

One of the film’s most remarkable aspects, a reflection of its agile back-and-forth between objective and subjective modes, is how funny the film is in observing the patients’ behaviors without once condescending or losing its sympathy and compassion. Many of the patients, including Virginia, use wit to cope with their predicament.

De Havilland should have won the Oscar. Well, no. She is vivid and moving; but hasn’t the role been made relatively easy by its division into action and voiceover, out of which she and Litvak were able to create dazzling point-counterpoint? I don’t see this as one of the greatest performances on earth. Indeed, it isn’t even one of the five “best actress” selections that I’ve made for 1948: Marlene Dietrich in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, Joan Fontaine in Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, Barbara Stanwyck in Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number, Kinuyo Tanaka in Yasujiro Ozu’s A Hen in the Wind and, my choice of the year’s “best actress,” Anna Magnani in Roberto Rossellini’s L’amore. Stanwyck was one of the five Oscar nominees, and the winner, Jane Wyman in Jean Nugelesco’s Johnny Belinda, transcends a creaky melodrama to be at least as affecting as de Havilland’s Virginia. (The other Oscar nominees were Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc and Irene Dunne in I Remember Mama.) My own feeling is this: If she hadn’t turned down the role, Susan Hayward would have been shattering in it.

Besides, who would want to reside in a world where Olivia de Havilland had won three Oscars?!

* The single Oscar that The Snake Pit won was in the category of best sound recording.

BEN-HUR (William Wyler, 1959)

William Wyler made some excellent films (These Three, Jezebel, The Letter, The Best Years of Our Lives), but, following the estimable achievement of Friendly Persuasion (1956), which took the top prize at Cannes largely on the strength of blacklisted Michael Wilson’s script, Wyler oversaw two colossal artistic disasters, the routine, inflated western The Big Country (1958), starring a pompous Gregory Peck, and Ben-Hur (1959), the third screen version of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel. A silly, uninteresting film, despite the level of care that Wyler typically lavished on it, Ben-Hur is worth a couple of comments based on a couple of its intentions. Certainly it’s strange to find Wyler, of all people, directing a “biblical spectacle.”

Jewish like his protagonist, Judah Ben-Hur, Wyler stated that he made Ben-Hur to offer a Jewish perspective on material usually presented from a Christian perspective. At the beginning of the first century, Judah is a prince and merchant in Jerusalem, now under Roman rule for nearly a century. His political falling-out with the newly appointed Roman tribune, his childhood friend Messala, leads to his galley enslavement on a war ship and the imprisonment of his mother and sister, whom he believes have been crucified (the Roman form of capital punishment). Judah has been a brutally treated slave for three years when, in battle, the ship sinks, and Judah, saving his life, is “adopted” and restored to wealth by its commander, Quintus Arrias. Thus begins an odyssey whose purpose is his revenge against Messala. Along the way, his path crosses that of a mysterious preacher whom the Romans condemn to death—a one-time carpenter who in Nazareth had given the slave Judah water for his thirst and to whom Judah, later, gives water when the man is being marched by Romans to his crucifixion. This is Jesus, and, although he remains a shadowy form whom the film in no way follows, the film implies that the lives of the two Jewish men are closely connected. The complete title is Ben-Hur: A Tale of The Christ.

Two points of identification are immediate. It is prophecies concerning the destiny of a just-born Jesus that precipitate the intensification of Roman oppression of Jews and lead to the replacement of Jerusalem’s pagan governor with the Roman one whose tribune is Messala. Both Judah and Jesus, moreover, in some sense embody Jewish suffering. Wyler specifically wanted to remind fellow Americans that Jesus, other Jews and Jesus’s followers all shared a common oppressor, the Romans, who are the ones that “killed Christ.” Catholics and Protestants alike had long promoted the fiction that Jews had had a hand in this, as though occupying Romans were in the habit of fitting state executions to the recommendations of occupied Jews.

The film was an enormous popular success that quite ridiculously—as ridiculously as Titanic (James Cameron, 1997)—won eleven Oscars, including as best picture and for Wyler’s earnest direction. However, it did little, if anything, to stem the tide of American anti-Semitism, which was undergoing one of its periodic transformations as Jewish activism in the growing civil rights movement moved American Jew-hatred into the vaster pool of white American hatred of blacks. Indeed, “message movies” rarely go beyond flattering the vanity of the already-converted, and, no matter what Wyler’s intentions, not that many filmgoers even identified Ben-Hur as a “message movie.” It was certainly not promoted as such but, instead, as an action spectacle highlighted by the rip-roaring sequence of the chariot race in which Judah destroys Messala—a sequence, I might add, staged and shot not by Wyler but by the production’s second unit.

Another one of the film’s ridiculous Oscars went to Charlton Heston, who plays Judah Ben-Hur. (It doesn’t take a Jew to play a Jew, but it’s worth noting that the part was originally offered to Burt Lancaster, a Jewish actor.) Heston, an atrocious actor, managed one good performance in his long career: as the Mexican narcotics agent in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958)—coincidentally, the one great film in which he appeared. However, Wyler, who had already directed Heston in The Big Country, had a reputation for coaxing the very best work out of actors. (I might add that Hugh Griffith, in a colorful role as an Arab sheik, also was Oscared, and Martha Scott, who plays Judah’s mother, capped her career.) But Wyler would have a rough time with Heston, a wooden-headed man who didn’t understand who or what he was playing. Indeed, for the rest of his life Wyler would regale people at parties with accounts of how he “tricked” Heston’s performance out of him—how he had to, because Heston was either too dull or too defensive to grasp an important (though by no means the most defining) aspect of Judah Ben-Hur. (The most defining aspect is the man’s Jewishness—and Heston scarcely grasped that, either.)

Judah is homosexual. Prior to the silence that the advent of Alzheimer’s imposed, Heston publicly always denied this about Judah. Let’s summarize: Heston won an Oscar for playing a gay man without, apparently, even realizing that the character is gay. Knowing full well the pleasure that Wyler (who was not gay) derived from deriding him on this score, Heston sank behind a wall of denials, as though, mercy! his very manhood was besmirched by his having even played a homosexual. But he did, and he won an Oscar for doing so.

Judah’s homosexuality isn’t an interpretation of the character; it’s a given. (By contrast, Van Heflin’s Oscar-winning role in Mervyn LeRoy’s 1942 Johnny Eager may or may not be gay depending on one’s interpretation.) Only the most naïve viewer fails to appreciate the intense closeness of the Judah-Messala friendship that generates their subsequent, equally intense rivalry. Indeed, only such a viewer can miss the point that Messala, now a Roman of station, only turns on Judah for fear that his former lover will “out” him. Moreover, the film leaves little doubt that Judah and Quintus Arrias also are homosexual lovers. (What else would they be?) One aspect of the film, in fact, is the contrast it makes between Arrias’s mature, secure homosexual identity and Messala’s immature, frightened homosexual identity. (There can be little doubt, also, that this contrast refers metaphorically to the different ways that vilified members of the Hollywood community, postwar, responded to threats of vanquished careers and even imprisonment for alleged national disloyalty.) When Messala asks Judah to spy for him on his own people, the code is unmistakable: Prove your loyalty to me, Messala is saying; prove that you won’t tell anyone my secret. Quintus Arrias has no such “secret”; he is what he is, and he lives what he is. It’s perhaps Gore Vidal’s (uncredited) contribution to the script that most accounts for the fact that politics in Ben-Hur often functions as a screen behind which primarily sexual matters play out—a point of some interest.

There’s nothing to discuss here about the filmmaking; it’s efficient and flat as cardboard, except for scenes in the leper colony, where Judah eventually finds his mother and sister living in a cave. Again, Scott is very touching as Miriam, Judah’s mother, and Cathy O’Donnell (she was Wilma, Homer’s girlfriend, in The Best Years of Our Lives)—Wyler’s daughter-in-law at the time—is good as Judah’s sister, Tirzah. These scenes in the leper colony are the only ones in the film that somewhat come alive emotionally. They are also the only scenes in which Robert Surtees’s (Oscared) color cinematography shows the least bit of refined intelligence.

Ben-Hur deserved to win a single Oscar, for Miklos Rozsa’s rich music—and this it deserved only because the Academy failed to nominate Duke Ellington’s stunning score for Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder. (The Academy was pointedly ignoring Ellington, as it had David Raksin, the composer of the gorgeous, haunting score for Preminger’s earlier Laura, as a way of dismissing, implicitly condemning, jazz.) Of the five films nominated as best picture, either Preminger’s or George Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank should have won, although it’s as hard to accept Millie Perkins as a Jewish schoolgirl as it is to accept Heston as a Jewish man in Ben-Hur.

To quote Anne Baxter, as Nefritiri in The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956), where Heston plays another famous Jew: “Oh, Moses, Moses, Moses!”

OF HUMAN HEARTS (Clarence Brown, 1938)

One might refer to the basis of Clarence Brown’s deeply moving Of Human Hearts as anecdotal national mythology. Perhaps the most famous instance of this sort of thing, where the United States is concerned, is the legend of young George Washington’s coming forth voluntarily with the truth that he is the one who chopped down the cherry tree. The father of their country, generations of American schoolchildren were taught, was dutifully honest even as a young boy, ready to incur a paternal whipping rather than compromise his nobility. A subsidiary legend, that the adult Washington had wooden teeth, was an attempt to suggest Washington’s ongoing truthfulness; those teeth of his, the tale implies, were cherry wooden teeth. His mouth of wood also links Washington to the crucified Jesus, while the title “father of his country” also suggests God the Father, linking Washington’s refusal to bear the mantle of King with God’s sacrifice of his only son in order to provide humanity with salvation. Washington was redeeming the political struggles of early Americans by allowing their republic to come into being and by representing its promise as its first elected president. None of this legendary stuff is the least bit current for two reasons: the divestiture of national mythology triggered by revelations of presidential untruthfulness pertaining to the Vietnam War and Watergate; closely connected to this, the deepening secularization of the folk idea of America that has been pursued by those who feel most keenly betrayed by instances of national deceit.

Nothing can quite match the Washington “I cannot tell a lie, Father” myth in the annals of American mythology, but a number of similar anecdotes have tried to compete with it, spurred by similar motives. One of these involves President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. The legend goes that Lincoln called from the battlefield a young soldier in order to give him a good tongue-lashing for failing to write home to his mother. Apparently this story has a toehold in truth, but its embellished form was meant to show how minutely human Lincoln remained while presiding over America’s at-home bloody war. This legendary anecdote prompted Brown’s film, which Brown co-produced as well as directed. If we watch the film today (as we should, for its fine Americana and wonderful acting), we literally see it through eyes for which it was never intended. America has moved on, so Of Human Hearts helps one to reconnect imaginatively and sentimentally with America’s past, purpose and mythmaking tendencies. If one is determined to uphold a critical stance, the film also provides interesting and worthwhile matter to take aim at.

The saga begins in rural Ohio. The Wilkins family arrives by steamboat from Maryland. Reverend Ethan Wilkins, accompanied by his wife, Mary, and their young son, Jason, is set to take up his ministerial duties. Ethan is a restrained, soft-spoken and uncompromising individual committed to serving God and the human community. He epitomizes piety, humility and charity. His is a “muscular Christianity,” as we learn when he decks and kicks out a community smart-aleck who disrespects the House of God by interrupting his remarks from the pulpit. Ethan and his wife are deeply in love. Their rebellious son is a source of heartache for them both. One of Jason’s difficulties is that he is unable to adapt easily to the family’s downward turn in circumstance. Preachers and their families rely on the generosity of the their congregations and communities. They have moved to a place of meager means.

Nor are some inhabitants generous even with their own. Mary remarks to George Ames, the general store-owner heading the welcoming committee, that she did not notice a schoolhouse in the village, to which Ames responds, “We ain’t got one. Last one got burned down, so we didn’t see much sense in building it up again. We figured too much book-learnin’ was bad for children.” It is worth noting that skinflint Ames is not a poor man. Ames is among those who manipulate Ethan into accepting a subsistence salary for the position he is filling. Ethan concludes the meeting at which this is done with a prayer that indicates his awareness of what has occurred and of his own resistance to any resistance to this outcome. He thanks God for God’s “infinite wisdom in giving me just one child to feed and just one wife to clothe.” The good script is by Bradbury Foote from the story “Benefits Forgot” by Honore Morrow.

Young Jason’s rebelliousness prompts his attachment to a surrogate father, Dr. Charles Shingle, of whom Ethan disapproves, forbidding his son’s contact with this disreputable man who drinks and gambles. Ethan especially disapproves of the worldly reading material access to which he provides Jason. Ethan expects obedience of his son, who not only disobeys but treats his father impudently on the issue. It is somewhat difficult to see why in this particular family Jason should be so blind as to the impact of his incorrigible attitude; on the other hand, it is exceptionally easy to see why Jason should gravitate toward Shingle, who is as amiable and relaxed as his father is taut and demanding, and who is, in fact, likely the one other male member of the community with as substantial a claim to goodness as his father. Ethan himself comes to appreciate Shingle’s virtue.

Clarence Brown’s direction of this film is decent and humane. Although there can be no question of Ethan’s moral superiority to that of his son, we see Jason’s point of view and, if we are the least bit selfish or self-centered as he is in spades, we may honestly confess finding Ethan’s humility and unselfishness a character mark too daunting for us also to match. A grown Jason accompanies his father throughout the hilly environs of the village, visiting the poorest of the poor. One of these is an elderly woman, living alone, the light of whose day, and possibly one of the most brilliant occasions of her life, is this visit. She pours her heart and soul into the soup she prepares for Reverend Wilkins and his boy. Unfortunately, a frog has found its way into Jason’s portion and he absents himself rather than swallowing it. His father feels that the boy should have eaten it and not made a fuss; he ought not to have done anything to risk shaming and mortifying their hostess. I absolutely agree, but I damn well know had I found myself in that position I also would not have done the right thing. It is very unusual for a Hollywood film of that day or even of this day to present such a human situation this fully and fairly. Partly this is strategic. We admire and like Ethan a good deal, and we don’t like Jason much at all; but Ethan is going to die, and we will be spending a good deal more time with his creepily unlikeable son. Yet another surrogate father, President Abraham Lincoln, will pressure Jason to confront the deficiencies in his character and his thoughtless, selfish treatment of the one person who sacrifices everything for him: his mother.

While being trained as a surgeon in Baltimore (a realization of Jason’s dream to return to Maryland—and, please, keep his mother’s name in mind), Jason repeatedly writes home for money, even going so far as to suggest to his mother which keepsakes she should sell. Otherwise he ignores his mother, whose abject poverty has left her nearly an outcast in her community except for the kindness of the person whom she has replaced as the principal object of derision: Charles Shingle. Jason has his mother sell the cupboard that is her daily material connection to her own mother, silverware, all sorts of things. When she can come up with nothing else, she sells her wedding band, her principal material connection to her late husband. For his spiffy military outfit, Jason suggests that she sell Pilgrim, the sweet, gorgeous white horse whom she named and whose stitching up after an accident gave Jason the confidence that he could become a doctor. Mary Wilkins gives up this horse for the only earthly creature she loves more than this horse. Without grasping what is happening, Jason is further and further isolating his mother, divesting her of precious keepsakes, and all the while withholding his own presence. He is a great battlefield surgeon on the Union side in the Civil War, easing as much pain as his father had done in a different capacity; but he has no time to let his mother know he is alive. After years of silence, she presumes he is dead and writes the president to find out where her son’s grave is so that she might make a pilgrimage to it. Lincoln calls in Jason; gently and forcefully, he confronts the man with his selfishness, at times with stunningly intelligent indirectness. Jason breaks down and weeps. Whipping out pen and paper, Lincoln orders the boy to write home. A furlough actually enables Jason to go home, and he doesn’t go home alone. Serendipity intercedes and allows Jason to reunite Mother and Pilgrim.

At the last, at dinner, Jason appears to be part of a human community; his mother is there, as are Dr. Shingle and a very patient girlfriend, whom Jason also had discarded. Before they eat, Mary gives the prayer of thanksgiving that her Ethan had always given. We do not doubt Ethan’s spiritual presence. Mary feels it, and we feel her feeling it.

Brown’s film is very patient and highly cumulative; it moves us gently to a waterfall of tears. Some of the imagery is strikingly beautiful; Clyde De Vinna’s black-and-white cinematography especially shines in a shot of Jason, shown against the nighttime sky, riding Pilgrim home.

But it is for the acting that this film lives. Walter Huston’s Ethan Wilkins is among this great actor’s most complex character creations; indeed, it may be his finest hour. Beulah Bondi is tremendous as Mary, giving what is doubtless her greatest film performance. (One recalls that Huston and Bondi earlier played a very different preacher and wife in Lewis Milestone’s Rain, 1932.) Charles Coburn is good as Shingle, and John Carradine astounds as Lincoln. James Stewart has a rangy role as Jason and perhaps not quite the technique necessary to finesse its upheaval; but he is very moving when Jason becomes belatedly human. Guy Kibbee, formerly Babbitt (1934), is in his element as Ames and very funny. Charley Grapewin and Gene Lockhart also ably contribute to what might be called one of the movie casts of our dreams.

THE DEEP END (Scott McGehee, David Siegel, 2001)

Remakes rarely approach the quality of the original films, least of all American remakes, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the original artist has generally already given the material the best possible form, requiring the remakers, to distinguish their work, to settle for a second-best form or one even more inferior than that. Also, whereas the original filmmaker could focus on the relevant thematic material, the remaker has also the earlier version with which to contend, and this can distract the remaker, diluting his or her efforts. Recently, most of us were shocked at the vastly inferior nature of Christopher Nolan’s loud, crass, diffuse, and just plain stupid remake (2002) of the brilliant Norwegian police procedural Insomnia (1997), by Erik Skjöldbjerg, one of the most stunning feature debuts in cinema. In this instance, another recurrent problem kicked in: its transplantation to a different country required a herculean effort to make the remake’s action seem “at home.” Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. At least in passing I should note that the most massively moving and beautiful film ever made, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s exalted expression of his Christian faith, Ordet (1954), from Kaj Munk’s play, far exceeds Gustaf Molander’s estimable earlier version (1943).

Ironically, Molander did much more to “open up” the play; stirred by Munk’s death at the hands of the Nazis, Dreyer instead hewed to the text out of respect for Munk’s memory. The recent well regarded thriller The Deep End, written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, remakes a film from Max Ophüls’s Hollywood sojourn in the 1940s, The Reckless Moment (1949); but in this instance, I cannot relate either version to the novel on which both films are based, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, having never come across it. (Raymond Chandler regarded Holding as the most suspenseful mystery writer of their day.) As a result I don’t quite know what to make of the remake’s singlemost shift in plot. Did the version that appeared two years after the book’s publication radically change this element to accommodate Hollywood’s timidity at the time regarding homosexuality in films? (Charles Jackson’s study of homosexual guilt, The Lost Weekend, a few years earlier had become an Oscar-winning film with all the homosexual references—the guts of the book—expunged.) Are McGehee and Siegel returning to or altering Holding?

I can compare only the films then, without reference to the original story. In both versions a mother disapproves of her teenaged offspring’s affair with an older man. In the Ophüls film, the child is a daughter; in this newer version, a son. The rest of the two plots is roughly similar. A lovers’ quarrel results in the death of the older partner; the mother disposes of the body and covers up the event. She in turn is blackmailed by two individuals, one of whom befriends her and eventually dispatches the other blackmailer before sacrificing his own life so that the woman can proceed to bring her life back to normality. In both films the military father is absent: in Germany, helping that nation rebuild after the war, in the Ophüls; at sea, in the McGehee and Siegel.

Ophüls’s Reckless Moment, befitting one of cinema’s premier artists (and one of the great Jewish artists of the twentieth century), is an atmospheric domestic thriller with profound reverberations. Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett, in the performance of a lifetime) is not acting as “the father” in her husband’s absence in order to maintain the family’s security and order. Rather, she is replacing—supplanting—him in order to contest her daughter Bea’s incest-by-proxy, which she (unconsciously) perceives as exacerbated by her husband’s absence. In effect, this absence prevents Bea from normally working out an Electra-complex, helping to turn her mother into a kind of therapist. Lucia does all she can to keep her family, as it were, inviolate; any intrusion must somehow be disposed of. In her harried attempts to protect her daughter and to raise blackmail money, she is an utterly sympathetic character; enhancing her sympathetic nature, as she clandestinely goes about trying to rectify a sordid and taxing situation, she is besieged by meddlesome inquiries from her son and father-in-law: males who would keep her tied down in a back seat. Indeed, a feminist portrait emerges of a subtly heroic woman battling the male prerogatives arrayed against her. At the same time, however, the sleazy world into which Lucia must descend in order to protect her family—a world of death, corpse-disposing, blackmail, loan sharking, quasi-adultery—taints her and adds something deeply unpleasant to the film’s portrait of her. Ophüls finds Lucia admirable; he also finds her ruthless in her determination to prevail. It’s elusive, to be sure, and her husband’s stint in Germany helps us to touch upon it, but Lucia displays glints of what Ophüls may regard as fascistic. (Perhaps her Italian name also helps us along this line.) The depth of all she is willing to sacrifice in order to protect what after all is a bourgeois domain, including the life of perhaps the only man she ever loved, the sympathetic blackmailer, Martin Donnelly (James Mason, marvelous), implies a horrifying aspect, as though the sordidness that initially had seemed so alien to her was in fact in some sense a part of her destiny. The severe nature of Lucia’s hairdo, even, with its careful arrangement of slick straight hair and iron curls, suggests an offputtingly formidable aspect. Ophüls’s ultimate point, it seems to me, is that the Second World War has changed the world, including America, on a purely domestic level, casting certainties—including male domination—into flux (a good thing), but also steeling with harsh, determined, unpleasant accents much in the everyday world that had once been guided, or seemed to have been guided, by clear, simple emotions. I can sum up The Reckless Moment in three words: Hitler changed everything.

The McGehee-Siegel version, updated to the present, has no such resonance or intellectual reach. It lacks conviction, in fact, because Margaret Hall, the mother that Tilda Swinton plays, never seems touched by the sordidness into which she also must plunge herself. (Swinton, good in Sally Potter’s Orlando, 1993, and even better in Tim Roth’s The War Zone, 1999, does only a tepid job here.) However, the shift of the relationship that leads to the accidental death from heterosexual to homosexual stirs up some exotic interest, especially when a videotape shows Margaret a scene of her son in bed with the sleazeball. Her rationale for ceding to blackmail then becomes the need to keep this information about their son’s sexual orientation from his father—a patent metaphor for the mother’s own denial of the matter. (Her dispatch of her son’s lover’s corpse to the ocean deep is almost too literary a device for suggesting her desire to drown the boy’s sexuality along with it.) In this redistribution of accents effected by the shift to homosexuality, Margaret’s complicity in the killing event amounts to symbolic incest with her son—I suppose an ultimate form of denial by a woman of her son’s homosexuality. Compared to the Ophüls film, this one is trivial and (psychologically) overelaborated. It’s borderline goofy.

Still, McGehee and Siegel thoroughly entertain. Those who ask no more than that from filmmakers won’t be disappointed.

HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (John Ford, 1941)

Based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley has the dubious distinction of being the movie that beat Citizen Kane for the 1941 Academy Award. John Ford, who won for the third time as best director (with yet another such prize up ahead), didn’t think much of the film, and with good reason. This is not an interesting film, nor a particularly good one. It is to fellow nominee Howard Hawks, not Orson Welles, however, that Ford apologized in person for his Oscar victory. Hawks received his one and only Oscar nomination for Sergeant York, although this is one of his weakest films as well. What does all this say about the motion picture academy?

Give How Green Was My Valley this: it is a better film than either of the best picture winners to follow, Mrs. Miniver (William Wyler, 1942) and Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, also 1942, but kept from opening in Hollywood until 1943). A lot of lousy films have won Oscars, including some of the lousiest, most unwatchable ones ever made: Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles, 1931), Cavalcade (Frank Lloyd, 1933), On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954), Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1956), Ben-Hur (Wyler, 1959), West Side Story (Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins, 1961), A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966), The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975), Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976), Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980), Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985), Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003). Such hollow, boring spectacles, tearjerkers and “entertainments” constitute an ignominious list.

Let’s say, then, that John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley is one of the better films to win the best picture Oscar. But that doesn’t keep it from being mediocre nor from possessing a hollowness all its own.

The protagonist is Huw, who lends voiceover narration as he prepares to leave the Welsh valley where he grew up. Now a middle-aged man, he recalls his youth, when he was the youngest child of Gwilym and Beth Morgan. Gwilym Morgan and his sons, including, eventually, Huw, are coal miners. A depression in the coal market leads to depressed wages for the workers; the Morgan sons and other younger-generation miners strike, but the settlement of the strike only forestalls economic decisions by owners, including downsizing, that devastates the working community. The Morgan family disintegrates as the grown sons move on, to find work elsewhere. Meanwhile, industrialization darkens and dirties the once pristine valley.

There is no reason why such material should not have resulted in a substantial and valuable film. The initial unionizing of a group of workers, especially in the absence of “outside agitation,” might have drawn a dramatic line of causality between the lot of workers and efforts at collective bargaining. Unfortunately, this film, by restricting its perspective to family dynamics in the Morgan household, shortcircuits such an opportunity. What we are given are confrontations across a generation gap as Gwilym retains faith in ownership and opposes his sons and the strike. The only glint of analysis that this situation provides derives from the irony that Gwilym’s traditional patriarchic authority in the Morgan household unconsciously mimics the exploitive antics of the mine ownership via-à-vis workers. The irony doubles when, as one of the higher paid miners, Gwilym’s purse is axed as a cost-cutting measure. Yet even these worthwhile insights grow faint and elusive given the film’s sentimental emphasis on the loving Morgan family and the deeply religious community to which it belongs.

Indeed, it is on the latter point that the film rings most hollow. A Godly vision that is visited upon Beth Morgan after the mine collapses and her husband is killed is preposterously rendered by Ford, whose atheism deprives him of any sensitive grasp of this gripping event. The American filmmaker famous for the dictum that one shouldn’t move the camera without some artistic purpose in mind jolts us with a sensational though meaningless camera movement the sole purpose of which is to distract us, and himself, from his complete lack of conviction here. I sympathize. Ford is entitled to his dismissive views about God and religion off the set, but his lack of faith makes him the wrong person to direct Philip Dunne’s script.

On another score, however, Ford has been wrongly criticized. Film critic Pauline Kael led the attack by faulting the sheer beauty of the set of the mining community, which struck her as being too well scrubbed to indicate reality. Keyed to the psychology of Huw’s memory, what we see here isn’t how the valley looked near the close of the nineteenth century but how Huw, now, remembers it, colored by his affectionate feelings for family and the distant past. Kael and others, then, fail to consider psychological realism; and, in any case, it borders on churlishness to fault this aspect when Huw himself notes the valley’s deterioration. Indeed, other elements of the film, such as the choral music perfectly sung by the miners as they return from work, are also keyed to Huw’s glowing memory. The literal-minded will never understand a poet like Ford.

Still, the film gives one plenty to carp about. There is insufficient historical context provided to make credible the stifled romance between the minister, Mr. Gruffydd, and the Morgan daughter. (These roles, incidentally, are beautifully enacted by Walter Pidgeon and Maureen O’Hara.) Too many of the alleged Welshmen too closely resemble Ford’s Irishmen. The music drips with sentimental affect when Mr. Gruffydd takes a sickly Huw on an outing to the hills to inspire him to recovery and to instill in him good Christian values. The blunting of the film’s political dimension, apparently, derived in part from studio head Darryl F. Zanuck’s insistence on successive script revisions. Not surprisingly, Zanuck identified with the owners of the mine!

The gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is by Arthur Miller. But how on earth did it better Gregg Toland’s in Citizen Kane in the eyes of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?